Nor need Turpin have stooped to a vicarious notoriety,for he possessed a certain rough,half conscious humour,which was not despicable.He purchased a new fustian coat and a pair of pumps,in which to be hanged,and he hired five poor men at ten shillings the day,that his death might not go unmourned.Above all,he was distinguished in prison.A crowd thronged his cell to identify him,and one there was who offered to bet the keeper half a guinea that the prisoner was not Turpin;whereupon Turpin whispered the keeper,`Lay him the wager,you fool,and I will go you halves.'Surely this impudent indifference might have kept green the memory of the man who never rode to York!
If the Scoundrel may claim distinction on many grounds,his character is singularly uniform.To the anthropologist he might well appear the survival of a savage race,and savage also are his manifold superstitions.He is a creature of times and seasons.He chooses the occasion of his deeds with as scrupulous a care as he examines his formidable crowbars and jemmies.At certain hours he would refrain from action,though every circumstance favoured his success:he would rather obey the restraining voice of a wise,unreasoning wizardry,than fill his pockets with the gold for which his human soul is ever hungry.
There is no law of man he dares not break but he shrinks in horror from the infringement of the unwritten rules of savagery.
Though he might cut a throat in selfdefence,he would never walk under a ladder;and if the 13th fell on a Friday,he would starve that day rather than obtain a loaf by the method he best understands.He consults the omens with as patient a divination as the augurs of old;and so long as he carries an amulet in his pocket,though it be but a pebble or a polished nut,he is filled with an irresistible courage.For him the worst terror of all is the evil eye,and he would rather be hanged by an unsuspected judge than receive an easy stretch from one whose glance he dared not face.And while the anthropologist claims him for a savage,whose civilisation has been arrested at brotherhood with the Solomon Islanders,the politician might pronounce him a true communist,in that he has preserved a wholesome contempt of property and civic life.The pedant,again,would feel his bumps,prescribe a gentle course of bromide,and hope to cure all the sins of the world by a municipal Turkish bath.The wise man,respecting his superstitions,is content to take him as he finds him,and to deduce his character from his very candid history,which is unaffected by pedant or politician.
Before all things,he is sanguine;he believes that Chance,the great god of his endeavour,fights upon his side.Whatever is lacking today,tomorrow's enterprise will fulfil,and if only the omens be favourable,he fears neither detection nor the gallows.His courage proceeds from this sanguine temperament,strengthened by shame and tradition rather than from a selfcontrolled magnanimity;he hopes until despair is inevitable,and then walks firmly to the gallows,that no comrade may suspect the white feather.His ambition,too,is the ambition of the savage or of the child;he despises such immaterial advantages as power and influence,being perfectly content if he have a smart coat on his back and a bottle of wine at his elbow.
He would rather pick a lock than batter a constitution,and the world would be well lost,if he and his doxy might survey the ruin in comfort.
But if his ambition be modest,his love of notoriety is boundless.He must be famous,his name must be in the mouths of men,he must be immortal (for a week)in a rough woodcut.And then,what matters it how soon the end?His braveries have been hawked in the street;his prowess has sold a Special Edition;he is the first of his race,until a luckier rival eclipses him.
Thus,also,his dandyism is inevitable:it is not enough for him to cover his nakednesshe must dress;and though his taste is sometimes unbridled,it is never insignificant.Indeed,his biographers have recorded the expression of his fancy in coats and smallclothes as patiently and enthusiastically as they have applauded his courage.And truly the love of magnificence,which he shares with all artists,is sincere and characteristic.When an accomplice of Jonathan Wild's robbed Lady Mn at Windsor,his equipage cost him forty pounds;and Nan Hereford was arrested for shoplifting at the very moment that four footmen awaited her return with an elegant sedanchair.
His vanity makes him but a prudish lover,who desires to woo less than to be wooed;and at all times and through all moods he remains the primeval sentimentalist.He will detach his life entirely from the catchwords which pretend to govern his actions;he will sit and croon the most heartrending ditties in celebration of homelife and a mother's love,and then set forth incontinently upon a wellplanned errand of plunder.For all his artistry,he lacks balance as flagrantly as a popular politician or an advanced journalist.Therefore it is the more remarkable that in one point he displays a certain caution:he boggles at a superfluous murder.For all his contempt of property,he still preserves a respect for life,and the least suspicion of unnecessary brutality sets not only the law but his own fellows against him.Like all men whose god is Opportunity,he is a reckless gambler;and,like all gamblers,he is monstrously extravagant.In brief,he is a tangle of picturesque qualities,which,until our own generation,was incapable of nothing save dulness.
